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At any given time, the 'order book' will have offers and bids at given prices and at given volumes. There can be imbalances in the order book.

If there are offers starting from 100,1 and bids starting from 99,9 but there is only one offer below 105 and many bids at 99,0 that is a valuable signal. From a 'random walk' perspective you would expect the price to rise quite soon. By spoofing you can either create this imbalance to get people to falsely trade on the imbalance, or you can hide this imbalance once you notice it so only you get to profit off the signal.

Hence, spoofing can be manipulative even if being a decent distance away from the current price, hence not running that much risk of the orders being filled.